Disaster Recovery Services for Chemical Manufacturing Company at Baroda: Gulbrandsen Technologies for SAP

CLIENT: Gulbrandsen Technologies Pvt Ltd
INDUSTRY: Manufacturing
SERVICES USED: Disaster Recovery Services, Managed Hosting and SAP Application Hosting
Solution Offered by ECS Biztech: Disaster Recovery on Virtualization

Gulbrandsen Technologies Division manufactures and supplies chemical solutions for multiple industries including water treatment, personal care, intermediates, pigments and electronic etchants.

Their chemistry starts with our people. We hire top talent in the industry, people who are dedicated to grow with our customers by building relationships based on trust and value.

Gulbrandsen (Chemicals and Technology) is focused on speed, quality and safety. They establish flexible systems that allow employees to respond quickly to needs and provide training to ensure products meet quality expectations in a safe manner using SAP Implemented.

ECS Virtualization methodology revolutionized DR concept for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) running SAP on Windows.

Implementing a reliable Disaster Recovery (DR) strategy and solution for a mission-critical application platform that was both robust and cost effective.

Gulbrandsen uses SAP for it’s billing, inventory, and order management systems. A SAP environment outage will impact business processes and cause revenue losses. Given that Disaster Recovery is a costcenter, the solution needed to be cost-effective without compromising on functionality and reliability. Using a Public Cloud IaaS platform seemed to be the prudent approach because of inherent attributes like instant scalability, rapid provisioning, simplified management, and a much lower TCO when compared to traditional hosting platforms.

DR on Virtualized Platform

• Rapid Provisioning – the entire SAP DR solution could be ported on to the Virtual Server approximately three times as fast as it could be on traditional hardware.
• Instant Scalability – scaling infrastructure on the Virtual Environment does away with elongated provisioning times for hardware. Server, Network and Storage resources can be augmented in minutes rather than days or weeks.
• Lower TCO – Significant savings in both hardware (servers, network, storage) and software licenses

All small and medium enterprises typically face the same challenge: to keep costs in control so that they don’t affect profitability of the enterprise. Enterprises expect that IT investments of any kind must start reaping returns immediately which is why most of them automate and streamline their business processes.

However, along with investing in the automation of mission-critical processes it is imperative to have a Disaster Recovery strategy in place. Small and medium enterprises must invest in solution level of redundancy that will help keep them prepared in the event of a disaster and ensure that mission-critical applications recover in minimal time to help them resume critical business operations.

Most SMEs, however, fail to focus on DR primarily due to the huge investments required to set up an inhouse DR facility. Other reasons include:

“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it”: Also known as the ‘Ostrich Syndrome’, most IT Managers perceive disasters as improbably events that will probably never affect them.

• Shortsightedness: Never having faced a disaster-related outage before, most SMEs fail to quantify the hourly loss they’d face in the event of critical systems going down.
• Motivation: Lack of senior management consensus, no one to push the case for a DR solution internally and therefore it is in a state of limbo.

Surprisingly, though aware about the importance of having a DR system in place, a significant number of SMEs do not want to make huge investments in setting up a DR facility.

These factors drive an SME’s decision to indefinitely postpone planning and implementing a DR solution.

Having a dependable DR solution is crucial for any enterprise whether large or small. In the event of a disaster, not ensuring continued business operations leads to irreparable losses in revenue AND reputation. For organizations who do not want to invest in having an in-house DR facility, a DR on Cloud or Virtualization is the best option.

ECS Biztech does Virtualization using either Citrix, VM ware, Microsoft Hyper –V , Red hat KVM is designed to offer small and medium enterprises a revolutionary and unique DR solution that will enable them to have an efficient DR set up along with high availability.

These various platform support enable every individual customer to chose the required and can be used both by SMB and large enterprises, can accommodate virtually unlimited users and is almost infinitely scalable
This is an ideal solution for both SMEs as well as large enterprises that run a SAP environment for production, development and training. The flexibility to scale up or down and pay-as-you-use model inherent to the Cloud help mitigate the reluctance to invest in a capital intensive DR facility.

Benefits to small and medium enterprises:

• It is a complete solution and offers the flexibility to pay-as-you-use.
• Having physical servers for DR is expensive, but since this solution is on virtual servers, it is extremely cost-effective
• DR on cloud allows business enterprises to choose the recovery window based on their requirements. The cost will completely depend on what they choose.
• Scalability: Hosting the environment on the cloud allows hardware to be instantly scaled, drastically reducing upgrade lead times.